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Old Dutch New York

Scholars are not sure what Margrieta van Varick looked like, or even how she spelled her name, even though she ran a successful furnishings import business in Dutch New York. In her meager surviving paperwork from the 1690s the name variants include Margrita, Grietje and Magret. What is known is exactly how many ebony-framed mirrors, silver-headed walking sticks, muslin curtains and porcelain cups she wanted her four young children to inherit as she lay dying at her Flatbush home in 1695, age 46.

She probably died of a neurological ailment: she calls herself “crasy of body” at the start of her lengthy will. Soon after her death Dutch officials appraised her household and store goods and sold off any property she had not bequeathed. Based on the officials’ 18-page inventory, still filed at the New York State Archives in Albany, the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan has assembled a show of a hundred 17th-century objects that she might have imported from around the world.

“Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick,” on view through Jan. 3 at the center at 18 West 86th Street, has cases full of Dutch gold jewelry, Indian cotton textiles, Massachusetts colonial coins, Indonesian silver bowls and Japanese lacquered plates. Bard borrowed them mainly from the New-York Historical Society and museums in New England and the Netherlands, after interpreting vague inventory listings like “East India flowre potts” and “home spun Blanketts.”

The gallery walls are painted sea blue and sandy taupe to evoke maritime trade, and the text panels and exhaustive catalog (from Yale University Press) explain the travels of the van Varick family. Margrieta, an Amsterdam native, moved to a Dutch colony in Malaysia around 1670 and married a Dutch Reformed Church missionary named Rudolphus van Varick. He took a Brooklyn post in 1686 and officiated there until his death in 1694. (A Reformed Church still operates at the site, 890 Flatbush Avenue; its motto is “Doin’ Good in the Hood Since 1654.”)

The van Varicks lived somewhere nearby, and Margrieta probably ran her store out of the house. Descendants have turned up (the Bard show contains a portrait of Richard Varick, a Revolutionary War hero, namesake of Varick Street in TriBeCa and a great-grandnephew of the couple), but no one seems to own anything that originally belonged to Margrieta and Rudolphus or their four orphaned children.

The exhibition research “has been maddeningly elusive,” said Deborah L. Krohn, a curator of the show. “But it’s been very seductive to speculate about what Margrieta thought about her things, and how she and her things occupied the same space only briefly, and why she was so careful to spell out which child should take what.”

Fragments Into Flowers

Mary Delany, a dilettantish British artist, became famous late in life. In 1772, at 72, after dabbling in painting and embroidery for decades while living on comfortable inheritances, she announced to her family, “I have invented a new way of imitating flowers.”

Photo

A self-portrait by the writer Jorge Luis Borges, one of about 2,000 works in a collection compiled by Burt Britton.Credit
Bloomsbury Auctions

She had figured out how to cut, tint and paste paper fragments into life-size simulated blossoms as complicated as snapdragons, hyacinths and anemones. A close friend of King George III, she knew aristocrats who owned huge greenhouses and gave her access to exotic imported plants worth copying, like New Zealand tea trees and Chinese saxifrage.

Fans as prominent as Horace Walpole and Erasmus Darwin beat a path to her London town house. “The work of her fingers and scissors,” one friend wrote, left visitors “astonished and pleased beyond expression.”

Her family kept together her lifetime output of nearly 1,000 botanical collages, which are at the British Museum and rarely travel. An exhibition of about 30 examples, “Mrs. Delany and Her Circle,” opens on Thursday at the Yale Center for British Art, with wall texts and an accompanying Yale University Press book that posit all kinds of deeper meanings for Mrs. Delany’s hobby.

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She accurately rendered every petal and stamen and carefully wrote down Latin labels like Sanguinaria Canadensis and Parnassia Palustris. So was she rebelling against her era’s strictures against scientific education for women and her tedious rounds of country house visits? “I do a thousand disagreeable unavoidable things,” she once complained to her sister. Or was she expressing her deep piety, documenting God’s creations in colored paper, or just entertaining herself? She attributed her expert cutting to “an idle mind that wants amusement.”

Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, a curator of the show, theorizes that Mrs. Delany feigned modesty while enjoying the attention her flowers drew and the chance to travel around studying aristocrats’ gardens. “She played conventionality with great practical success,” Ms. Weisberg-Roberts said. “She got away with an enormous amount.”

Famous Self-Portraits

Burt Britton, a retired bookseller, used to ask his famous customers to scribble self-portraits on scrap paper. He helped run the Strand Book Store in the 1960s and ‘70s, then co-owned Books & Company on Madison Avenue at 74th Street from the store’s founding in 1978 until his departure in 1980. Even celebrities with no drawing aptitude complied with his strange request: Dennis Hopper drew a circle with an X inside, and Joan Didion wrote a note that said she was “too thin — astigmatic” to try sketching herself.

Mr. Britton owns about 2,000 of these mementoes and is selling a quarter of them on Thursday at Bloomsbury Auctions at 6 West 48th Street in Manhattan. Estimates range from about $300, for Renata Adler’s blend of her own features and the art critic Harold Rosenberg’s profile, to $30,000 for Philip Guston’s grizzled portrayal of himself scowling and smoking.

Mr. Britton started the collection in the mid-1960s when he was a bartender at the Village Vanguard. One night he persuaded Norman Mailer to scratch out a crayon self-portrait. That snarl of curly hair and a prominent nose is estimated to sell for $2,000 to $3,000.

Only a few of Mr. Britton’s bookstore customers seem to have spent any time on their entries, which reveal such agonized forethought. The photographer W. Eugene Smith inscribed “This is one of my worst efforts” on a densely crosshatched charcoal image of a tree trunk (expected to bring $1,500 to $2,000), and Elaine de Kooning portrayed herself at an easel surrounded by rejected, crumpled sketches of her face. (Bloomsbury has priced that work at $3,000 to $5,000.)

Correction: September 24, 2009

A report in the Antiques column on Friday about a retired bookseller, Burt Britton, who is selling some of the self-portraits he asked famous customers to draw, misstated the duration of his co-ownership of Books & Company on Madison Avenue. It was from the store’s founding in 1978 until his departure in 1980, not until the store’s demise in 1997. (He also helped run the Strand Book Store in the 1960s and ’70s.)